rns.recipes

Putting this in off-topic as the following information might be self evident for the majority of you, but might still be of of interest to some - even if it just confirms assumptions as to what is, and what eventually will be:

I'm currently visiting Shenzhen, it's my 3rd time in China. I evidently was VERY curious what would happen.

Results: Nomadnet, Announces, LXMF, LXST, RCC, partyline, everything works. Not a single more packet dropped, nothing. All TCP/IP interfaces I tried connected, all of them. It was in fact a real pleasure to use and talk to my friends over on MeshchatX.

Which ONLY means, to be clear, that reticulum is currently NOT targeted as part of the GFW, in any way whatsoever. Which is good news, but won't last.

To give you an idea of how "good" the modern GFW is at what it does, the ONLY realistic way, even for network engineers (not a skill issue), to access anything blocked by the GFW is via roaming on a foreign e-sim. VPNs haven't helped in years, Mullvad for example is totally useless, all they have to do is detect the wireguard handshakes and nuke. Even private VPS, encrypted SOCKS proxy Shadowsocks) don't work - the GFW defeats all VPNs via entropy analysis and probing. Sadly, the notion that you can VPN your way out is used as marketing fodder for companies like the hucksters at Astrill, which cost me 30 bucks to confirm to you that none of it works here, either.

Even I2P has been atomized (I tried trust me) - their techniques are far too long for this post but bootstrapping ain't happening - ever - filtering, poisoning, DPI, and cryptographic signature detection + kademilia crawling, and I'll stop here but the list goes on.

And I know this will be upsetting for a lot of you but evidently LoRa is not only very severely restricted (max 50mW EIRP) but also licensed: TX hardware must be SRRC (State Radio Regulation of China) certified. Which is why the lovely salesperson at Lilygo smiled at me and politely told me to buy their gear from my home country on Aliexpress as he wasn't allowed to even sell me the TDeck I was excitedly holding my hands. Also to be clear: unregistered LoRa txs are monitored in all urban areas and are foxhunted and prosecuted.

Oh, what a situation, thank you for writing about it (: I remember i2p. There used to be Chinese people on the forums, but I remember them complaining about the bad conditions and how hard it was to connect.

I am fairly certain China has a large amateur radio community, but I wonder if it is the same as it in most places where it is largely older people who are unwilling to try the new LoRa and digital radio devices. The great firewall as it is called does seem restrictive but they do have a people's revolution to defend.

I haven't dug in enough, but what does the packet look like for RNS when running over TCP or UDP? Presumably this could be identified and also blocked.